The young Viennese pianist Anna Magdalena Kokits is about to embark on a cross-Canada tour, from Halifax to Vancouver, that will include a free concert next Wednesday in the National Gallery of Canada’s auditorium.

Below, Kokits, who is not yet 30, discusses the passion that she’s had for music since she was a child, as well as her interest in presenting “buried treasures” along with the works of renowned composers.

Q: How were you exposed and attracted to music when you were growing up?

A: My musical genes probably derive from my grandfather. He was a pharmacist with an abundant love for music. He used to work in the pharmacy during the week and play the organ in church on Sundays, always rising to the challenge of improvising intricate preludes and postludes with unprecedented spontaneity and virtuosity.

Since both my parents were musicians as well, it simply was the most natural thing for me as a child to sit at the piano and play for myself, just for the fun of it. I’m told I was about four years old when I started playing but I actually didn’t have proper lessons until much later. My early years of music making were almost entirely playful and marked by an insatiable hunger for music. I learned to read music so early I don’t even remember it. From then on I just sight-read anything I could lay my hands on.

Q: What was it about playing the piano that first interested you?

A: For some reason the piano has always been my instrument. I did play the violin for five years from when I was about eight, but even during those years and despite my ongoing love for string instruments I always felt more connected to the piano. Why? I guess if one looks closely, deep connections of any kind are beyond words.

Q: Now, what does playing piano mean to you? Beyond furnishing you with a career, how does playing your instrument satisfy you?

A: To be honest, I don’t focus on the career aspect. I make music because I feel the necessity to do so. It is my means of expression by which I am able to transmit something — let’s call it “the indescribable” — to other human beings. That is the greatest gift for me.

The piano is the only instrument by which a single player can emulate an entire orchestra. This gives freedom and independence. The piano is also fascinating because in a way it is both a string and a percussion instrument. This contrasting mixture resulting in endless possibilities of expression and sound provides a rewarding and exciting adventure with every piano I encounter.

Q: Your website notes that Alejandro Geberovich has been your “ideal teacher and mentor.” How old were you when you began studying with him and when did you stop your lessons? What did you learn from him?

A: I met Alejandro Geberovich and started having lessons with him when I was 11 or 12. He is an amazing pedagogue who developed a unique method of piano playing by uncompromisingly searching for answers to his own difficulties as a student. I was lucky to receive from him technical means to express myself as well as a deep understanding of music as a language with its own laws and principles. I treasure this knowledge not only because it gave me a solid base which I can rely on and from which I can develop further, but also because I’m aware that it is a gift that I can and want to pass on to and share with others.

I believe that a good teacher provides his/her students with the tools they need to eventually work independently. Alejandro Geberovich in this respect and many others was not only a good but a great teacher.

I consider myself extremely lucky to have met him at such an early age. I know of so many musicians who had to look for the right person to guide them for a very long time. Some have the feeling they never really found them, or at least not at the right moment. To have the opportunity to form a trusting student-teacher relationship, have continual guidance and follow a clear path, especially in those early shaping years, is rare. I continued my studies with Alejandro Geberovich well into my 20s, right up until I graduated at the Konservatorium Wien Privatuniversität, and I’m extremely grateful for everything he gave me.

Of course inspiration from many sources, be it other musicians, teachers, recordings, concerts, human encounters of any form, life itself!, has also been extremely important and invaluable and I wouldn’t even be able to start to list all the wonderful people who have inspired and supported me.

Q: Let’s talk about the program for your Canadian concerts. Starting with the most well-known names — why are the pieces by Beethoven and Gershwin on your program? What do these pieces mean to you?

A: I’ve always loved Beethoven and felt at home with his musical language. The 32 Variations in C minor are very interesting because, apart from the last two, none of them is longer than eight bars. Hence the character changes often and abruptly.

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is one of the first pieces for piano and orchestra I learned as a teenager. I included it again in my repertoire only a couple of years ago and have been playing it since. It gives me great joy, both in its solo version and in the one with orchestra. The former allows even more freedom, whereas the latter has a very special energy, rooted from the orchestra.

Q: There are lesser-known and contemporary composers also represented too. Why is it important for you to address the work of lesser-known Austrian composers? What can you tell me about Austrian classical music beyond Haydn, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Strauss?

A: I try to compose programs that would be attractive to me as a concert-goer. We are blessed with a repertoire for piano or piano with any combination of other instruments which seems to be almost endless and even more so once you look beyond what is considered the standard repertoire.

There is so much wonderful music which is yet to be discovered. Therefore, I always try to slip in at least one lesser-known composer. It is true that some concert organizers are afraid to lose audience if, for example, a living composer is played, but it is equally true that in most cases once you have lured the audience into the concert hall even the most unknown and unheard of music casts its spell and often turns out to be the most exciting part for the audience.

And of course many people also come to listen to unusual programs precisely because they are curious to discover something new.

During the inter-war period, the arts in Austria and Germany flourished. With Hitler coming into power and the resulting wave of emigration as well as the many artists perishing in the concentration camps, a lot of music got lost or forgotten. For me this period of the 20th century is full of buried treasures.

A few years ago I discovered Ernst Toch through a CD project and was so taken by his music that I decided to record his piano works. Luckily Toch survived the war but unfortunately his career was cut short through his emigration. What has always fascinated and impressed me about his music is the reduction to the essential and substantive. Every note conveys the impression of being absolutely necessary, and not one is superfluous or replaceable. Ernst Toch’s music is convincing, and his story moves me in such a special way that I feel a great need to make his music accessible to a broader public again and to contribute my share towards reintegrating the “most forgotten composer of the 20th century” — as he often called himself in the final years of his life — into musical life today.

Q: Why did you choose to play a piece by Vivian Fung? Do you have a sense of what contemporary Canadian music sounds like?

A: I spent a lot of time researching Canadian contemporary piano music before I found Vivian Fung’s piece Glimpses. It really was “love at first sound.” I knew immediately that I had found the piece I wanted to add to my program as a Canadian contribution. Vivian Fung manages to extract sounds and colours from the piano that I have never heard before. I am extremely excited about her music. She has an absolutely unique voice.

Q: Is it important to you to promote the work of young women composers like Vivian Fung and Manuela Kerer?

A: It is important for me to promote the works of young composers in general. I do think that women are sadly still heavily under-represented in the world of composing as well as conducting. So yes, it is also important to me to bring female composers’ music to life and I’m grateful for having the opportunity and the freedom to do so. What matters in the end, though, is always just the music, what it transmits, what it lets us experience, what colourful, adventurous, magical worlds it opens.

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